Isaac Babel's gaze upon men and the world

Isaac Babel (1894-1940), a Jew of Odessa, is regarded as one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century. To present him, I take up remarks from the foreword to his Œuvres complètes (Complete Works), gathered and translated in remarkable fashion by Sophie Benech. Konstantin Paustovsky speaks of him thus: “He was a demystifier […] inclined to skepticism and even to cynicism, but in reality a believer in the naivety and goodness of the human soul.”¹ He was reproached (in particular by Varlam Shalamov) for his attraction to the hoodlums of Odessa. But, as Nadezhda Mandelstam notes in her memoirs, he was drawn toward criminals not by a morbid fascination but by an unbridled curiosity. If he frequented the Chekists, it was “to sniff them out, to sense what odor they give off.” The passionate interest he took in beings and in the world was, along with literature, his reason for living. “His vision of the world and of people […], it was not through declarations that he expressed it, but through his way of writing. […] Babel passes no judgment on what he describes, except by the subtle agency of his style and his language.”² Red Cavalry best illustrates these remarks.³

May 1939, Isaac Babel is arrested by men of the NKVD — the ancestor of the KGB — an organization charged with “combating crime and maintaining public order,” responsible also for the security of the State and for the Gulag. His manuscripts and his drafts are carried off and have never been found. Tortured, he — who had so often given proof of his courage — admits to having written works far removed from Soviet reality, to having made remarks critical of Stalin’s policy. Then he retracts before a tribunal composed of three Chekists. He is executed in January 1940, at forty-five.

Red Cavalry describes, in its own inimitable manner — full of beauty, of humanity, of lucidity and of desperate insolence — the Polish campaign, which began in April 1920, which was the penultimate episode of a civil war that set against one another Reds, Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, revolting peasants, Cossacks, Germans, Makhnovists, and in the course of which the Jewish populations were massacred on every side. The Red Cavalry, the Cossacks of Marshal Budyonny, after remarkable successes, is halted in August, and a peace, very unfavorable to the Soviets, is signed in March 1921. Isaac Babel accompanied the Red Cavalry as a war correspondent from May to September 1920. The short narratives that compose the book are those neither of a journalist nor of a historian, but of a great writer with a keen political gaze and a lucid human one. We comment here on a few of his narratives.

The horrors of war

For Budyonny, Babel (p. 1253): “a failed writer. […] To describe the class struggle, a historic struggle without precedent in the history of humanity […], Babel tells us old wives’ gossip […], he covers with mud the best of our communist commanders […]. Incapable of seeing the grandiose upheavals of the class struggle […], he sees the world as a meadow covered with naked women, stallions and mares.” Budyonny is not entirely wrong, but he does not understand Babel’s literary genius and his political and ethical choices. Babel writes, p. 529: “I grieve for the fate of the bees. They are martyred by the warring armies. There are no more bees in Volhynia. We have defiled the hives.” Nonetheless Babel does take note of the technical innovations of war (p. 532), for example the transformation of everyday tools into weapons of war (the perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda did the same, but they also used modern weapons, not only machetes), such as the tachanka, an ordinary cart on which machine guns were mounted: the ancestor of the present-day pick-ups so widely used in the current wars in Africa and the Middle East.

At the very heart of the narratives, Babel sets out his choices as a writer, when he makes the vow (p. 506) to follow the example of the modest village painter who gave the saints, the Virgin and Christ the faces of the local peasants. He describes, without recoiling before the unbearable scenes, the violence of the combats, the massacres, the famine, the often criminal — generalized — antisemitism, on both sides, but also sex, death, jealousies, rivalries, brawls, thefts, daily life that goes on. He also shows the extraordinary courage of the Red Cavalry and the absolute devotion of the cavalrymen to the cause of “the Revolution” (reduced to this single word and personified like an ideal woman), and their fidelity to their chief, Budyonny. Babel intermingles the heroic and the derisory, History and the most everyday, courage and pettiness, their reciprocal aggressiveness, at times infantile and dangerous.

He casts upon these characters and upon reality, even the most terrible, an ironic and poetic gaze, transfiguring it, without contempt or dramatization. He describes not only the combats, but also the men and the women, their emotions, their thoughts, beyond the revolutionary or counter-revolutionary declarations, and also nature, massacred like men by the war. Budyonny, who had expected a lyrical chronicler of his immortal exploits, demanded the firing squad for Babel after having read the book.

Between reportage and staging, Babel makes us hear the unique and pathetic voice of each one and his speech — of sadness, of distress, of hatred — without ever covering them over with his own. But these voices say what seems to him right, what he wishes to hear and to make heard, at his own risk. The mortal confrontation is not between the classes, between the Soviets and their multiple enemies, between heroic combatants, but runs through all families, all communities, along complex and blurred lines of fault and fracture. War destroys, physically and morally, the bonds of family, between parents and children, between siblings. The contradictions are also at the heart of individuals.

In a small town, an old hasidic rabbi, full of bitter humor, is surrounded by “the possessed, the liars and the loafers.” His son too is present, “who had Spinoza’s face, Spinoza’s powerful brow and the sickly face of a nun. He smoked and twitched like a fugitive brought back to prison after an escape […]. He is his accursed son, the last son, the unsubmissive one.” (page 526) Babel finds him again four months later. He is among the Soviet soldiers in flight, all stricken with typhus. His belongings are scattered on the ground: “Everything was in a jumble — the propagandist’s certificates and the Jewish poet’s notebooks. Portraits of Lenin lay side by side with those of Maimonides […]. Crooked lines of verse in Hebrew huddled in the margins of communist tracts […], pages from the Song of Songs and revolver cartridges […]. He is dead, the last prince [of the line of the rabbis of Zhitomir.⁴] […] And I, who can scarcely contain the tempests of my imagination within my ancient body, I gathered the last breath of my brother.” (page 632). This narrative closes the 1926 edition.

In a village, lodging, in a poor house, is assigned for the night to Babel. There live a pregnant woman and two Jews. The father is dead, his throat cut by the Poles. “The woman, with a terrible force, [says]: ‘I would dearly like to know […] where, in all the world, you could find a father like mine.’”

In another narrative, a young soldier writes to his mother that “the father [fighting in the White army] […] massacred my brother,” whom he had taken prisoner. Then: “After that we set off chasing General Denikin, we massacred them by the thousand […], only the father, we couldn’t find him anywhere.” (page 499) He ends up finding him and killing him savagely.

For Babel, Budyonny’s Cossacks do not exist only in the present combat; some of them have a long and complex history, which is not foreign to their commitment, to their hatred, or to their suicidal desire. A man and his fourteen-year-old stepson, Sasha, have both contracted syphilis from an old beggar woman. Back at home, where the couple’s two children have been carried off by typhus, Sasha hears his stepfather begin to make love to his mother. He tells him, in vain: “Don’t hurt mother, you’re rotten.” He then goes off to enlist in the Red Cavalry. Page 542. Elsewhere, the Whites had killed the parents of one of the Cossacks, the neighbors had pillaged their house. Returning to the village, he recovers his belongings, kills the thieves, sets his house in order again, stays shut up there for two days, weeping and getting drunk, kills the cow and sets fire to the house, then disappears on his horse. (p. 534)

Criminal violence outside the combats exists on both sides. Page 564. “A few Cossacks were in the process of executing for espionage an old Jew with a silvery beard. […] Kudrya […] seized his head and thrust it under his armpit […], and he cut the Jew’s throat.” Then the political commissar makes his speech to the perplexed bourgeois and the despoiled Jews. “The power is yours! Everything here is yours. […] I move to the election of the revolutionary committee.” The counter-revolutionaries (p. 656) practice collective and repeated rapes, carried out by syphilitic Cossacks; they use child soldiers, whom they pervert by making them transgress all the structuring rules. Babel’s sharp gaze does not turn away from horror, speaks of it without grandiloquence, lets his tenderness and his pity for the victims and their dignity be glimpsed. Thus, the raped Jewish servant acts as if, in time of war or of peace, these rapes, like the murders, were part of normal life and of her destiny as a Jewish servant. But he also knows how to show, in the worst brutes, the small detail that preserves them from absolute monstrosity.

Babel’s tenderness, his respect and his admiration go above all toward women and particularly toward prostitutes. This will be still more visible in his collection (published in 1931, devoted to the collectivization and the dekulakization of the countryside) and in Gapa Guzhva, the widow who drinks her half-liter of vodka straight from the bottle, who has “debauched all the lads of the village,” who tried, in vain, to thaw the delegate of the regional executive committee charged with the collectivization, but who at the same time was the first to enroll in the collectivization committee. To the pitiless judge, come to replace the dismissed delegate, who requisitions all the peasants’ wheat, sends to penal servitude those who protest, drives the others to suicide, she asks: “What is going to happen to the whores? […] Will they disappear? Will they be allowed to live? — Yes, says the judge, but they will have a different, a better life. […] Lighter clouds raced low over the earth. And silence spread over Velikaya Krinitsa, over the flat desert, dead and frozen, of the village night.” (page 920-4)

Babel does not escape his own history either, nor his own faults, which he does not conceal, all while reserving to himself his liberty of discretion, at times of mendacity, or of blurring the trail (his “lying-true”). He is not a recording apparatus, of words and of acts; he is not exterior to the terrible civil war; he knows his contradictions: Jewish and fully Russian, a peaceful intellectual interested in the Odessa underworld and in the Cossacks, brutes and antisemites, a subtle writer, an admirer of Maupassant, who must give an account of Budyonny’s battles. He writes thus (p. 518): “On the eves of the Sabbath, I am tormented by the dense sadness of memories.” He thinks back to his grandfather, to the books of an old Jewish scholar of the twelfth century, to his grandmother weaving her spells. In the old Jewish quarter of Zhitomir, become wretched, there remains only the old merchant Gedali. “The revolution — to it one can say yes. But can one say no to the Sabbath? […] I cry yes to the revolution, but it […] sends nothing before it but gunfire […]. The Poles fire because they are the counter-revolution. You, you fire because you are the revolution […]. The revolution is made by wicked people […]. So who will tell Gedali where the revolution is and where the counter-revolution is?”

In his regiment, Babel undergoes, as an intellectual and a Jew, the humiliations and the threats of the Cossacks. (page 522). Billeted for the night with an old and wretched peasant woman, he decides to show them that he is as brutal as they. Arranging to be clearly visible to them, he grabs one of the few geese, crushes its head under his boots, and holds it out to the old woman, after having struck her, so that she may roast it for him. The Cossacks then welcome him among them. But, in the night, his act torments him: “I dreamed of women, and only my heart, crimsoned with murder, creaked and bled.”

Babel does not defend the value of his weaknesses, and he acknowledges that his incapacity to fight and to use weapons can have cruel consequences. (page 535). D., the telegraph operator, his belly torn open, asks to be finished off. Babel cannot do it; his friend Afonka does it, then, furious, wants to kill Babel. “You lot, you four-eyes, you have no more pity for us than a cat for a mouse.” Likewise (page 626): “You went up to the attack […] and you had no cartridges […]. What’s the reason for that?” The Cossack wants to kill Babel as a traitor.

Babel, an engaged writer, neither conceals nor attenuates anything of the horror of war, but he integrates it into the beauty of his writing, which he does not renounce — not in order to attenuate it, but in order to render it more perceptible and intelligible. “The smell of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips into the coolness of the evening.” (page 493) Babel concludes thus the narrative of a battle (page 627): “The village floated and swelled, a purple clay flowed from its dismal wounds. The first star sparkled above me and sank into the clouds. The rain lashed the willows and lost its force. The evening flew up into the sky like a flock of birds, and the darkness laid upon me its wet crown. I was at the end of my strength and, bending beneath this funereal crown, I went on my way, beseeching destiny to grant me the most elementary talent there is — that of killing a human being.”

Babel describes events and men neither head-on nor globally, but by small touches, apparently marginal, far indeed from the heroic and historical exploit. He shows, simply and subtly, the hinterland, as true and as important as the warlike and political scene; the strength and the fragility of men, their indestructible humanity, at times behind their contrary appearance.

To Isaac Babel I associate Osip Mandelstam,⁵ his contemporary, another very great writer, Russian and Jewish, killed as well by Stalin and his dictatorship. Literature was, for both, their reason for living. But they did not live outside of time and far from men. They cast upon their era, in violent crisis, and upon those who took part in it, as executioners, victims or witnesses, a lucid and keen gaze, without judgment, without contempt or blind admiration, a human gaze, conscious of the qualities and the weaknesses of men who are capable of accomplishing the worst atrocities as well as acts of Good. This gaze, and the way in which they knew how to transmit it to us in their works, is always of the present.

Notes